By golly it's been a while! Probably high time for an update as, even with the lives that we lead, where little new has happened basically since the 90's, something must have happened since late May. Now it's no secret that as we get older the time speeds up in an exponential manner whereby time goes by faster and faster and that makes you just even older which in turns makes time go by faster than before, ad infinitum. If you are five years old, meaning that your entire conception of time consists of just five years, that means that by the time you're 40, 8 years (1/5th of a lifetime) goes by as fast as a year did when you were five. No wonder there hasn't been an update around here since May.
In the ~20 weeks since our last drop (note that drop is some kind of slang, popular especially in the hype-fuelled watch industry, where a new product is "dropped" and you have to like race to get it before they run out, and is quite popular with post-millenials, I believe), 25% of which we spent in the Colonies, things have remained remarkably stable. Heinrich recently beat world record for "sick days accumulated" while Helga achieved a similar commendation for "number of times screamed rudely at parents and sibling within one calendar day". We were so proud.
Big happenings around Munich have included the return after a two year hiatus of the world famous Oktoberfest and the first time since last year that it rained every day in September. The Pemulis family hosted Thanksgiving recently, put some artwork up on our walls, tried attending a 50th birthday party (interrupted by a Heinrich hospital visit), bought a new dishwasher (!), witnessed our retirement savings dwindle down to the equivalent of a month or so's rent, tried planning a weekend trip only to be rebuffed by being parents and everything that that entails, and scheduled a service for our cargo bike. Boy was I wrong when I said nothing much had happened!
But what we do have is the future. If we aren't wiped out by nuclear armageddon and the world remains at least partially inhabitable in the face of accelerating climate disaster, oh yeah, and we aren't forced to move into the pension house due to out of control inflation and the even faster declining stock price of America's second-favourite rideshare app company, we eagerly await a Pemulis trip to the city of lights where he will reunite with his estranged brother and they will bond over a long lost idea to drive vintage mopeds across Germany where they will get up to all sorts of crazy antics including putting on a much-loved tap dancing spectacle at a Bodensee wine festival; a Christmas-time visit from Grandma where she will hopefully keep the two small H's occupied while Pemulis and Joelle drink a coffee uninterrupted for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall; a potential trip to mighty snow-capped mountains of Austria; and, most importantly, the follow-up to "Crossroads", if Jonathan Franzen can ever get around to it.